The Devil_s Garden

FIFTY

For Detective Desiree Powell it was a long shot. She hated long shots. If all her players were still in New York City, it would only leave five boroughs, hundreds of neighborhoods, tens of thousands of streets, and a hundred thousand buildings to search. Not to mention the world that existed underground – subways, basements, tunnels, catacombs. So she made a command decision. She had to put herself and her team somewhere.

This was why she made the big money, just enough to keep her in subway tokens and Jimmy Choo knock-offs.

She parked at the corner of Steinway Street and 21st Avenue, scanned the block, the long row of red-brick row houses, the small stores interspersed between, each with a colorful sign trumpeting their wares and services. There was a drama unfolding in each one of them, she thought, life-altering comedies and tragedies and farces that, to the outside world, would proceed unexamined, unknown. Until some unexpected horror descended, and they called the police.

Was the theater of Michael Roman’s tragedy unfolding in one of these buildings? Or had the curtain already fallen?

She shifted in her seat. Her ribs were getting worse. She had taken six Tylenol already. She would need the hard stuff before the day was over.

When she looked in her side-mirror she saw Fontova come running up, out of breath. Bracing herself against a fresh sword of agony, Powell opened the door, gently slid out of the car.

“You hear about the two cops on Roosevelt?” Fontova asked.

An “officer needs assistance” call had gone out over the radio twenty minutes ago. Powell had not heard the details. “What about them?”

Fontova bent over, catching his wind. Sufficiently recovered, he continued. “Uniformed officer was directing traffic around an accident on 98th Street. A car stalled, and when they were just about to push it, a guy jumped out a car behind the stalled car. He pulled a knife and cut two cops.”

“Jesus Christ. How bad?”

“Both are on the way to the hospital. One of the officers got a shot off, but he missed.”

“They have the cutter?”

Fontova shook his head. “Took off. There’s a BOLO on the vehicle and the doer. White male, thirties, tall. Driving a black H2.”

“Shouldn’t be too hard to spot.”

“It gets better.”

“Doesn’t it always?”

Fontova reached into the inside pocket of his suit coat, took out the composite sketch of the man who had broken into the Arsenault house.

“You’re shitting me,” Powell said.

“Not,” Fontova said. “And two witnesses put a woman and a little blond girl in the H2 with the cutter. And dig this.”

Powell just listened.

“The stalled car was a blue Ford Contour.”

Powell’s head began to spin. “Our Bolo? The one Michael Roman drove away from that motel?”

“Yep. Other wits said they saw another man and another little girl running from the scene.”

“Did we get a description on the man?”

“Not a good one.”

“Got to be Roman, right?”

“This is what I’m thinking.”

“What happened to the car?”

“The 114 has it. Still on the scene.”

Powell glanced down the road, towards Ditmars Boulevard, back at her partner.

“Where?”

He thumbed over his shoulder. “Two blocks up. They also found an H2 behind a building off Lefferts.”

“This is the center of the world today.”

Fontova nodded.

Powell closed her eyes for a moment, began to connect the dots. A few moments later she opened her cellphone, called it in. They would set up a perimeter.

This section of Queens, near Astoria Park, was made up of row houses and small retail establishments. There was a large contingent of Greek immigrants in the neighborhood, but over the years Italians, Poles, and eastern European immigrants had moved into the area, and their influence could be seen on the variety of awnings and flags and stores.

By the time Powell and Fontova pulled onto the block there were a half-dozen sector cars in position, a dozen or so uniformed officers fanning out. They began to knock on doors, talk to people on the street. Powell and Fontova split up. It was a warm, early evening, and the sidewalks were congested.

Powell did her best to keep up with Marco Fontova and the rest of the team, but she knew she would be lagging far behind. The first person she talked to was a man standing in front of a pager store. Black, sixties, salt-and-pepper goatee, silver hoops in both ears. He may have been a player once, right around when the Chi-Lites had hits.

“How you doing?” Powell asked.

The man looked her up and down, smiled lasciviously. Real dreamboat. Powell wanted to shoot him in the ribs, see how he liked it.

“It’s all good, baby,” the man said.

Powell no longer had her badge, but she did have her NYPD ID. She took it out and clipped it to her pocket. Suddenly, it was no good, baby. The man was now afflicted with blindness, deafness, muteness, and amnesia. Powell asked the questions anyway, moved on.

The sixth time was a charm. A pair of skateboard rats, skinny white kids, about fourteen, idling in front of a corner smoothie shop. One had on a T-shirt that read Alien Workshop. The other wore a lime-green Mizuno bicycle jersey. Powell held forth a photograph of Michael Roman.

“Have either of you seen this man?”

They both looked at the photo. “Hard to say,” said lime green.

“He might be with a girl,” Powell said. “A little blond girl.”

“Oh yeah, yeah,” Alien Workshop said. “He just ran by here a little while ago.” He squinted at the photo. “He’s a lot older than that, though.”

“Which way?”

He pointed toward the park.

“The little girl was with him?”

“Yeah.”

Powell got on her two-way, dispatched four officers to Astoria Park. She continued down the street, each step a fresh stiletto in her side. She walked past bagel shops, unisex salons, an open fruit-and-vegetable stand, past a trade fair, a laundromat. The massive police presence in the neighborhood had drawn attention, but it had not shut down commerce.

Between 32nd and 33rd Streets, about a block from the Astoria Ditmars subway stop, Powell stopped. Two reasons. The fact that she couldn’t walk anymore was the main. The other was that something was nagging her, besides her aching torso, something that walked the edge of her recall like a rearranged melody. She stood on the street, scanning the buildings, the windows, the people. She had walked a beat on these streets a long time ago, an area that stretched from the park all the way to Steinway, back in the day when community policing meant shoe leather and Pepsodent.

Across the street was a Greek travel agency, a Jackson Hewitt office, a nail salon.

What the hell was nagging her about this stretch of Ditmars?

She held her ID high, limped across the street. Thankfully, traffic slowed. Some people actually came to a full stop.

Powell walked into the nail salon. A girl behind the counter looked up from a magazine.

“Help you?”

The girl was about twenty, with blunt-cut, multicolored hair, a set of dazzlingly bright spangled nails. There were no customers in the shop.

“Have you got Internet access?” Powell asked.

Nothing. Powell tapped the ID on her chest. The girl looked from the ID to Powell’s eyes. Powell asked again, this time speaking a little more slowly, enunciating every word.

“Have… you… got… Internet access?”

Now the girl looked at her as if she were from another planet. Maybe the Alien Workshop. “Of course.” She turned the LCD monitor on the counter to face Powell, then slid the keyboard and mouse forward.

“Have you got a stool, something I can sit on?”

Another pause. Powell was beginning to wonder if there was some sort of drug-induced time delay in here, one caused by a long-term exposure to nail-salon chemicals. The girl caught on, slid off her stool, picked it up, and walked it around the counter.

“Thank you,” Powell said. She eased onto the stool, opened a web browser. She searched again for the New York article on Michael Roman. Her eyes blazed down the page. She found the paragraph she had been looking for, and finally located the itch. She got on her two-way, raising Fontova. A few minutes later he walked into the nail shop. By that time, Powell had navigated to an overhead map of the surrounding ten-block area.

Powell briefed her partner. Fontova looked at the map.

“Okay,” Powell began. “We have the initial crime scene here.” She put a virtual pushpin in the building that housed Viktor Harkov’s office. “We have the Ford Contour last seen in Roman’s possession here, which is also where our cutter attacked two police officers. And lastly we find the H2 in which our alleged psycho made his temporary escape abandoned here.”

Powell leaned back, looked at the locations. “Now, I love this part of the city. Don’t get me wrong. But what the fuck is so special about Astoria, and especially this here little slice of heaven around Ditmars?”

She slipped a dollar into Fontova’s hand. He took it without comment.

“I don’t know.”

“I think I do.”

Powell maximized the other browser window, the one displaying the New York article. She pointed to the screen, at the paragraph that mentioned Michael Roman’s childhood, about how his parents were murdered in their place of business, a place called the Pikk Street Bakery, a place that Michael Roman and his wife had purchased a few years earlier.

A place located at 64 Ditmars Boulevard.